


Things To Be Mended

by lurker_writes



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, mid season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-12 00:18:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18000185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurker_writes/pseuds/lurker_writes
Summary: Shirts. Hearts. Purposes. Bonds. Between them all, there are many worn and fragile things.





	Things To Be Mended

The wagon jolted over a stone in the well-worn ruts of the road and Trevor’s hands, already clumsy with the chill, jolted as well.

“ _Shit_ ,” he hissed as he dropped the needle and let it dangle from the partially stitched slice in his shirt. There was a little drop of blood beading up on the pad of his thumb. He licked it away without thought. “Sypha, can’t you—”

“No.” She didn’t even bother to look at him. “I am driving the horses. Just because I am a woman does not mean I am going to—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” came the sigh from the bed of the wagon.

Trevor grit his teeth. The vampire put on an air of long-suffering, but they’d only been suffering each other for a matter of days now.

“Give it to me,” Alucard demanded in that dozy, overly-cultured drawl that set Trevor’s temper right at the cliff’s edge.

Trevor had every intent of refusing just on principle, nevermind that his stitches were crooked and oversized even at the best (worst) most sober of times. They were good enough to hold his shit together, even if it was poorly, and that was good enough for him. Until, of course, it wasn’t and his hasty mending tore open again under the strain of one brawl too many.

Like now.

Sypha preempted him by swiping his shirt from his lap and tossing it back over her shoulder without a single glance or a ‘by your leave.’ One slender, marble-pale hand darted out from under the shadow of the canvas and retreated with his shirt firmly in its evil, evil grasp. With very little choice under the weight of his (perhaps half-hearted) enmity, Trevor clambered over the back of the bench to follow where his clothes had gone.

He was too sober for this bullshit.

The vampire held his shirt up with a curled lip and a critical eye, before he tsked and set to picking out Trevor’s stitches with one sharp claw. The hand steadying the fabric rested lightly atop the Belmont family crest, inhumanly still.

“The thread, please.”

“What, you know how to sew?” Trevor scoffed, but still held out the last of his thread. He was honest enough to admit, if just to himself, that _he_ knew how to sew like a fledgeling knew how to fly – in theory only.

“Naturally.” Alucard glanced up, the barest flick of those yellow eyes, before he returned his focus to threading the needle in one sure motion despite the bumpiness of the road. “My mother would never allow such foolishness as _men’s_ or _women’s work_ , and my—” His words, and his hands, stopped dead for a moment. “I’ve learned a great many skills,” he finished, slyly.

But not quite sly enough to spare Trevor a moment of uncomfortable recognition. He was more than equipped to spot a man avoiding a memory soured by circumstance. Or half a man, as the case may be. And half a monster, which Trevor would blame for goading him into a new burst of insensitivity.

“Papa come home with ripped shirts often?” he grunted. “What else did you learn at your mother’s knee, how to get blood out of collars?”

Sypha whipped around in her seat, her lips pursed in a way that suggested she was moments from setting his hair alight. “Can you not be civil for just one moment?”

But Alucard breathed a half-whispered laugh and trailed his fingers over a small stain at the collar of Trevor’s shirt. “No. Most of us know how to eat without dribbling our meal down our neck, Belmont.”

“Your mother taught you to sew?” Sypha prodded, and cut their bickering off at the knee.

Alucard made a few more stitches with light, quick fingers. They were neat, miniscule things, as different from Trevor’s wavering attempts as could be. He peeked up again with his bright wolf’s eyes before returning to his task. “My _father_ taught me how to stitch a wound, while mother tended her patients. But mother did mend clothes as well as people. I spent enough time sitting at her feet while she worked, listening to tales.” _Stitch, stitch, stitch_. A small, wistful smile flitted across his face and was gone. “When she stuck herself, she always held her finger out and asked me to kiss it better.”

So fond. So… Trevor had spent enough of his own childhood resting his cheek against his mother’s knee, or his sisters’, and kissed his share of pin pricked fingers. His gut churned, and he told himself it was _implications_ , not familiarity. “Kissing it better, or lapping up your mother’s own blood? That’s sick, I’ll have you know.”

“Hmm, but is it?”

They both looked to Sypha, who had tilted her head thoughtfully. Her little finger toyed with the loose end of the reins in her hand.

“It’s a mother’s instinct, to nurse her child,” she mused.

“With _milk_ ,” Trevor protested.

Sypha waved a hand. “Milk from her own body, which is not a simple or painless task. And yet, it is still done. For the mother of a dhampir, a few drops of blood already spilled doesn’t seem so strange a thing to offer.”

“It’s not natural.” But even Trevor felt his objection was feeble, however he’d balk at admitting that to his companions.

A dhampir’s birth was not unimaginable to him, but that Alucard lived and grew – not because the Belmonts were slaughtered and the woman had nowhere to turn for help, but because he was wanted, a cherished son instead of a horrific consequence… The idea set the foundations of his world spinning like a whole evening of strong drink.

“My mother was a woman of science, not of superstition.” Alucard’s voice was quiet, but there was a testiness to his tone that no comment about him –  or his father – had ever brought forth. “And there’s no need to concern yourself, _Belmont_ , as it will never happen again.”

A chill settled under the canvas of the wagon, only partially to be blamed on the crispness of the air.

Without a word, Trevor rose to his knees and shuffled to the rear of the wagon. He sat himself down for a silent shift of the watch with slumped shoulders. He didn’t need Sypha to tell him that he’d spewed like the useless drunkard he was, and finished by putting his foot in it. He chanced a peek back over his shoulder.

Sypha’s back was a taut, drawn line of temper, her shoulders creeping ever upward toward her ears. Alucard… Trevor only knew what it was like to be broken. Alucard did not look like a broken man. He looked… brittle. He held himself with the stillness innate to a stalking thing, and yet the air around him seemed to hum and vibrate with the violent potential he kept constrained. He was like a bowstring pulled taught to loose one last arrow, before it snapped and whipped its wielder’s eye out as well.

“Will you tell me more about her?”

“I’d rather—”

“I’d like to carry her story back to my people,” Sypha hurried on. “Properly. Speakers are the keepers of the truth. The Church and its faithful may call her a witch, and your father a monster—”

“Perhaps he is,” Alucard whispered.

“—but I will not allow that to be her memory. We will carry the hopes of her life, and the cruelty of her death, and the— the grief behind this madness. I think I would have liked to meet them. I will at least make sure that we remember them as you do – as they were.”

Alucard gave one long, trembling exhale, barely audible over the wind.  “They— I… I think they would have liked to meet you, as well. I’ll tell you what I can. I— _Thank you_ , Sypha.”

Something disquietingly like guilt, or grief, roiled in Trevor’s belly. He tuned them out the best he could, let his word narrow to the land behind the wagon and the ache of a three day hangover. At some point he slumped back and dozed. It was fine. They were resting in shifts now, anyway, two awake at all times.

The well worn hell of his mind was easier to stomach than the fresh hell of a dhampir’s tale of woe.

He woke to the afternoon sun, still chill and wan, and Sypha nudging his knee with her sandal.

“Come back to the front,” she murmured. “Alucard is resting.”

And indeed he was, pressed against the side of the wagon and bundled under his coat so that only the toes of his boots and the golden crown of his hair peeked out.

Trevor stretched the kinks out of his spine as he walked around the wagon. The cracking was only made worse by sleeping on hard boards, without a shirt, in chilly weather. He again mourned the loss of his cloak. True, it had smelled of stale drink, and stale vomit, and stale piss; but it had been ever faithful at keeping him warm.

Speaking of his shirt…

Sypha hopped back up into the wagon and settled herself down. The ends of her clothes brushed over his shirt, folded more neatly than he’d ever seen it and waiting for him on the seat. He rushed to put it on, and the froze, smarting like his conscience had been backhanded.

All of his stitches had been picked out and redone, not just the most recent. The new work was so tidy it neared invisible. No more uneven edges. No more odd puckers in the fabric. The dribble of dried ale at the collar had been blotted clean.

There was needlework at the cuffs. Though he kept his wrists habitually wrapped, small sections had frayed and started unravelling years ago. The tips of the embroidered leaves were now plain linen instead of faded green, like a plant that had begun to dry, but they were sharply pointed and whole again. Not only that… two new flowers bloomed on the previously bare vines, little flax blossoms picked out in the blue of a Speaker’s robes.

He held his shirt up and stared, struck too dumb to do anything else.

“Perhaps,” Sypha suggested mildly, “you should put it on?”

Trevor peered up at her, back at his shirt, and then at the sun starting to slant under the canvas of the wagon. “Let me sit on that side.”

In front of the… in front of Alucard.

Sypha sighed. “Please leave him be. He’s had enough of—”

But Trevor clambered up, and Sypha did slide over, and as he settled himself down, the breadth of his shoulders cast a good swath of shadow behind him. Alucard’s hair no longer shimmered in the sunlight.

Sypha glanced between the two of them, her mouth a perfect little _oh_ of surprise.

“Shh,” Trevor whispered, while he tried to quietly – _quietly_ – wrestle himself back into his clothes. “Let’s keep moving. If we make good time, we might get there tonight.”

“Hmm,” Sypha agreed, and urged the horses to walk on.

He emerged again just in time to catch the tilt of her smile.


End file.
